imho a highly disingenuous way [not you Number 6, the guy you quote] of saying the obvious-but-kapu:  women are considered less than fully human in a male-supremacist ideology, thus to "treat someone like a woman" is the ultimate put-down;  also, in that ideology, the "correct" way to keep women and children in line is with physical bullying, hitting or threats of hitting ("discipline");  and notions of control and dominance even in the abstract are likely to be verbalised through metaphors of rape, prostitution, and battery.

To open handedly slap someone. Denote disrespect for the person being bitch slapped as they are not worthy of a man sized punch. Suggests the slap was met with little resistance and much whining. Urban Dictionary

Explananda -- I find the commenters' bewilderment about how this expression went mainstream a bit naive;  it went mainstream at about the same time that everything else about prostitution went mainstream, over the same period when yuppie college kids started going to halloween parties dressed as "Pimp and Ho," and yuppie moms started buying their 7 year old daughters "Porn Star" brand underwear.

Wikipedia -- different threads emerge here, one being that a "bitch-slap" is the kind of slap a girl would deliver, i.e. not a real punch.  the dominant thread however seems to be:  a slap delivered to a female by a dominant male, to shut her up or subdue her.  at any rate a highly gendered term.

could it be the author is baiting his [male?] readership by saying, "hey, the Republicans are treating you like women, you are their bitch, where is your pride?" -- without any reflection apparently on the degree to which his comment accepts and reinforces the same attitude to women?  kind of like Red-baiting, the ground assumption being an inherent ineradicable Taint (of femaleness, of Socialism) whose ascription would galvanise the readership into an  reflex of repudiation.  the original form of "if you're not with us you're against us" being, "if you're not masculine and tough then you're a girl, eee-yew, cooties."

"rough" slang in this case seems to me a euphemism for "pimp-speak" or "overtly misogynist cant" -- imho.  to my ear this is as regressive as e.g. promising to "work my new trainee like a n*gger", with many of the same implications of dominance, coercion, contempt.  would we laugh off such language as "rough slang" (with its connotations of rugged, if slightly oafish, masculine virtue) or recognise it as simply racist?  and does the writer resort to this "rough slang" in an attempt to retrieve, and flaunt, his own Liberal Masculinity in competition with the Rethugs who have recently attempted to corner the meme-market in Manliness (even if a wee bit o' padding is required here and there)?

I was discussing with an old friend -- old enough to remember, as I do, a time when prison rape was something that shocked and disturbed average Americans rather than being treated by tv comedians and ordinary people as a kind of national joke -- the curious shift in attitude to this abuse.  he said

I think there's also a class thing going on here; I remember listening to Kris Welch's phone-in show on KPFA in the early 80's, right after a couple of really loathesome child molesters had been caught, and hearing a caller, after carefully noting that she opposed the death penalty, go on to speculate hopefully that they might be killed by other prisoners. The moral cowardice of this, and the peculiarly class-based attitude--that we will let the lower orders do the dirty work while we keep our hands clean--still makes me mad. (Kris, a person I've always thought was basically dull-witted, supported the caller's sentiments.)

there may be some connection here to the economic draft, and the sending of lower-class boys (and a few girls) off to do the dirty work of Empire (the 'wet work' as the spooks call it with rather awful accuracy)...

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

Stephen Donaldson was arrested for public protest.

But it was another first -- a brutal episode in a Washington, D.C. jail -- that catapulted Donaldson to national prominence in 1973, as the first survivor of jailhouse rape to discuss the issue publicly. He called a press conference to describe his experience after being jailed for trespass at the White House during a peaceful Quaker protest against the bombing of Cambodia. His jailhouse experience was at first relatively innocuous until the warden of the jail, suspecting that Donaldson, a former Associated Press reporter, might be writing an expose of brutal prison conditions. The warden transferred him to a cellblock with violent offenders, where he was gang-raped approximately 60 times over a two-day period. Upon being released, he underwent rectal surgery at a Veteran's Administration hospital. He later testified about his experience at a Washington, D.C. city council hearing. The Washington Star-News, calling for the resignation of the head of the D.C. jail, called Mr. Donaldson "a man of uncommon understanding."

Stephen Donaldson spent most of the rest of his life working to publicise, and to stop, prison rape.  He died of AIDS at 49 or 50 years of age (AIDS contracted as a result of being gang raped in prison).  

is your position then that he should not have protested in the first place, since he knew that arrest was a possibility?  or, if your position is that his arrest and detention were obviously wrongful, then unless and until we can guarantee that no arrest or detention will ever again be wrongful, would it not be better to make the conditions of incarceration less brutal?  prison rape can very easily be a death sentence, due to the role of prisons as a dispersal mechanism for AIDS and other diseases and the generally low level of medical care available to inmates.

but going back to general principles:  does this endorsement of 'laissez-faire snakepit punishment' indicate that you are, in principle, in favour of torture -- as a suitable punishment for certain selected people, who commit certain acts which are particularly loathesome?  if so, would you be willing to perform the torture -- or rape -- yourself?  if that would not be right, would you pay agents of the state to do it?  should we have official torture rooms?  [and how different would this be from stoning, acid-throwing, amputation, whipping, beheading, etc. all of which we right[eous]ly consider barbaric when inflicted by the authoritarians of certain other cultures for crimes which they consider loathesome?]

or is it easier/sufficient to throw offenders "to the dogs" and let them be victimised by the same people who are already in prison for hurting, raping, torturing, etc other people?  i.e. the Australian Penal Colony concept -- throw them all down the memory hole and let them eat each other?  declare them de jure non-humans and write them off the law books -- as the US has done to the inhabitants of its little gulag at Gitmo, most of whom have committed no very great crime?  Kafka warned us about this. Solzhenitsyn lived through it.

and it is OK to torture animals?  i.e. if to torture people is merely to treat them "like animals," presumably torturing animals is OK/normal also?  surely not...

should the pilots who dropped WP on Falluja be tortured because they did a disgusting thing to innocent people?

if you categorically "do not believe" that men in US jails are badly treated ("like animals"), does this mean you believe that all the (many and exhaustive) reports of prison abuse are utter fabrications?  Stephen Donaldson and all the thousands of other men who reported this abuse are all pathological liars?  HRW, Amnesty, and other watchdog groups are just making all this up?

colour me puzzled.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

"That story doesn't imply a love of violence.  It implies a nearly unspeakable hatred of people who hurt children.

Right. It isn't a love of violence.  That would be wrong, of course.  Instead, what's implied is an acceptance of, a tolerance for the violence which, it's hoped, should sate and avenge your hatred for the people who hurt children.  "Hurt" being a mild description of what some people do to children.

 So typical is the American thirst for revenge that prosecutors routinely take every opportunity--both before and after conviction--to arouse and enflame the jury's emotions, to incite this very hatred you've described.  That DAs do this so routinely cannot be purely by accident.  They do it because for so many people, the lack of good grounds to convict the accused can often be off-set and overcome in the jurors minds by distracting them with the horrifying details of the crime, which, logically of course, have absolutely no bearing on how sound or unsound is the actual evidence presented against the accused.

 It works, juries too often convict because the idea of allowing someone who just may be guilty go free on so heinous a charge is too much for their good, decent hearts to bear.

And, yes, I do believe that man deserves whatever he gets.